don walker

*first time

let's try again.. with line breaks.

i saw him for the first time with tex and charlie earlier in the year

'harry was a bad bugger' is the best written song i've heard in the last coupla years

so, people-more-informed-than-me, where should i go from here?

i'd like to know too. i've not heard any of his stuff outside of cold chisel, but 'flame tree' is one of the best australian songs I've ever heard.

his new album is pretty good - some superb songwriting and it's on warners so you can actually buy it in a shop

"we're all gunna die" is great but pretty hard to find i think

he hasn't been prolific, solo-wise

which i guess he doesn't need to be, seeing as how he would have more royalties than God

Check Out Speed Kills on YouTube - with da Hutch

http://www.messandnoise.com/discussions/87588

Haha Speed Kills is a god-awful song.

He's only had a couple of solo albums, I think. One recently and one about ten years ago. I haven't heard the new one, but apparently it's pretty good. He was fantastic at Manchester Lane a couple of months back.

Check out his first solo album, released under the band name 'Catfish', it's called 'Unlimited Address', really a bloody great record. His singing sometimes is a bit strained and colourless, but the songs are awesome. The track 'Pre War Blues' is one of my fave songs.

It's a great album, eh Burt? Reminds me Yr 9 - school cricket, sunburn and going home to listen to eat yogos and cheese & bacon balls, listening to this album.

There was a second album under the 'Catfish' monica, though I never picked it up - d'you, Burt?

'going home to eat yogos and cheese & bacon balls, listening to this album' that shoulda read.

Hi Dan, yeah, it has memories for me too - sitting listening to it on LP in the front room of my parent's house in high summer.

"From her front room, I can hear, the early trams of a brand new year. She's wearing now the camisole her daughter sent to her from Vienna."

fucking poetry!!!!

I like Ruby more than Unlimited Address. Check it out

harry was a baaad bugger, a bad bugger allll the way

don seems to have a unique skill for painting pictures of real australiana, with perfectly observed details. like the "hair and beauty salon" and the "coupla gurls".

Didn't Prestwich write Flame Trees?

nah walker did

and questionmark, that video for speed kills was awesome. pity about michael hutchie fucking things up in the second half!

fuck donnie w is awesome

do yourselves a favour and soulseek his version of ac/dc's there's gonna be some rockin' tonight

the way he menacingly croons you should see her shiver and shake / when she gives the lithium pills a break is sweet as

I cant believe the spiegeltent show in Sydney has sold out already!! Been waiting to see him play solo forever! If anyone has a spare ticket to sell i am absolutely desperate.

dide he write cheap wine?

Indeed.

Flame Trees was a co-write with Prestwich.

I will Swap someone A Patti smith ticket 5 rows from the front If you can get me to The Don.

i wouldn't offer that just yet...

Go on....

pm coming.

Cold Chisel are part of triple js impossible music festival this weekend...you youngsters should check them out.

I've been in and out of trouble, mainly in...

love him.

the shows that he did with the suave fucks at the vanguard a few years ago were excellent

They were but personally i think solo will be amazing! hence my distress:)

fair call, chief

i can't remember if i ever saw him proper solo - i seem to remember seeing him at the basement once supporting someone-or-other, but i think there was someone else playing guitar or piano, leaving don free to do some sterling suit/cigarette/mic work - have a very strong memory of him singing a stunning ''barlow and chambers'' at this gig

hey luke. Unfortunately that don walker show has been cancelled.

Don has signed with Destra Music, which will release a Don Walker anthology/live 2CD pack with a bonus DVD alongside remastered expanded versions of the two Catfish Albums (Unlimited Address & Ruby) and We're All Gunna Die in 2009. Included with the Anthology will be a Don Walker & The Suave Fucks live album recorded in one concert in November 2006 and a short DVD of documentary footage from the Suave Fucks tours of 2006, including the band on stage at the Vanguard. Also due for release in 2009 is ''Shots'' Don's first ever book with Black Inc Press.

That is a shame that its cancelled. I hope he's ok.

doing a book interview thing at gleebooks march 11 if anyone is interested. only $10.

coincidentally, about 90 minutes before seeing the poster for this in the gleebooks window, i saw the man himself sitting at a cafe in moore park.

Tim Rogers reviews Shots in the latest Monthly; preparing himself for a new career?

Shots
By Don Walker
Tim Rogers

Two years back I spent time with Don Walker in the manner to which we're both accustomed: meet in a lobby, jump in a van, drive to a show, play, drive back, avoid morning duties with shaky resolve. I was intimidated, not merely by his prowess as a songwriter but by his steady gaze. Come 4 am we were talking of Iran and Farsi, tales of exploration as intoxicating as almost everything in Shots, a memoir of sorts.

The ‘shots' from a childhood in northern New South Wales are presented with a detachment recalling Hal Porter's tales of youth. There's no lament for a world hurtling by, because it's just a raised thumb on an unmarked road away. At the dinner table Don's father tells of ''a world where all walls crumble before a balanced, enquiring mind'', and it's surely not simply a revisionist memory that equates ''Newtonian cantilever physics'' with barn-dance sexual politics. It's the balanced, enquiring mind of a man ballpein-hammering at a piano in a soulful rock band from the Adelaide suburbs, his head cocking up every 36 bars to check all are present and accounted for.

As he enters university, with its lecture-dodging charlatans and the submarine presence of music constantly threatening to break the surface, our protagonist appears a man out of time, as if the experimentation of the era is mere folly. The joy in this book lies here, in the same way that a solemn description of a truck-stop coffee and soulless toasted sandwich burnt my lips without howls of hyperbole turning them into a cat's bum. Juxtapositions abound: aerodynamics and rock 'n' roll, sex and loneliness, drugs and unforgiving sobriety. The coolness in recollecting the formation of a great band is no pose - the hipster is 16 bars ahead, knowing that all is transitory. As his life turns menacing and tragic, it's this acceptance that keeps him observant in the eye of the storm.

Rock music is populated with many of the duller characters to have graced the globe, but a handful of restless romantics know that at its heart is a truss of darkness and furious light into which anger, love and desire can be flung. Don Walker does it as well as anyone, and in the absence of a tune his stories have greater weight, an ache that has me packing a bag, wanting to chance my arm at something a way up ahead.

I thought that review was superb.

it's a great book if you can get into the rhythm of his joyce-ian style. Filled with vignettes of the Australia that used to be, but noone seems to do it that way anymore.

Cold Chisel fans will read it and go ''so that's what that lyric is about'' etc. (or that's what my sister did), even though he hardly refers to the band. Don't read it if you want to know about Cold Chisel, read it as a great autobio.

I do love this clip, it stands up well to time.

Those who hate the band, it's only a short clip.

Those who hate the band can fuck right off. Thank you.

it IS such a good song....

on par with Died Pretty's Winterland

seeing there's so much politics on M&N today. Lindsay Tanner enjoys Don Walker

but then again, Lindsay also commended Susan Boyle......

his song 'port adelaide' (the first half of speed kills) is so f'n good i don't know whether to shit or go blind

Five spuds. Simply the best Australian song writer.

Notes Live has a Don Walker ALBUM LAUNCH listed for May 8th. SOMEBODY TELL ME SOMETHING ABOUT THIS???? Cutting back is so under appreciated it is scary!

OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE by Chrissie Vincent: WE'RE ALL GUNNA DIE Don Walker Cold Chisel songwriter reissues classic debut, remastered from original one-inch tape August 7th through MGM Don Walker's elegantly weather beaten Australian masterpiece, We're All Gunna Die, never belonged to 1995. As grunge slouched into Britpop, skate-punk and trip-hop, here was a record lost in time and rooted in a different place altogether: an anthology of big, dark stories with a sound as empty and majestic as the land they seeped from. Fourteen years on, digitally remastered via the same ultra-rare one-inch tape machine on which it was originally mixed, the album's huge sonic depth and blood-soaked, red-dirt gravity never felt more potent. We're All Gunna Die is like a hand drawn map to some mythical motherlode of forgotten Australian stories.

The ones about dancers formal and exotic, desert slave traders and delusional fugitives drinking up their last tropical sunset; songs about circuses nobody goes to anymore, parties that end badly and highways that don’t end at all. ''This album was recorded in 1994, with a very good band in a very short four days,'' Don recalls. ''We rehearsed a lot of songs in the front room of a house in Kings Cross, then went into Electric Avenue Studios with Phil Punch and recorded mostly live.'' Cold Chisel, the band Don helped form in every sense of the word, were 10 years gone.

He'd made one wildly appreciated album with Tex Perkins and Charlie Owen, Sad But True, and two under the radar as Catfish. We're All Gunna Die was the first under his name, he says, ''because it was the first record that finished up how I wanted it.'' Dave Blight (harmonica), Red Rivers (guitar) and Garrett Costigan (pedal steel) nail down three crucial corners of its elusive sound: a lean but rock-solid scaffold that re-imagines the visceral rawness of Chicago blues for a ghostly landscape of shifting sand and lizard bones. Many of the songs were first takes, including Three Blackbirds, the 18-minute true story that closes the album. Don retrieved the unspeakable tale of Harry Hunter, Sid Hadley and Frenchy D'Antoine from under the threadbare rug of our colonial past while visiting Broome in 1984. Fashioned into the 19th Century broadsheet ballad it always should have been, the song remains a benchmark illustration of his unparalleled reach and craft as a songwriter. We're All Gunna Die has been remastered at Stirling Sound in New York by George Marino (Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC, John Lennon). It's the flagship release in an extensive Don Walker reissue campaign scheduled for 2009 in the wake of his highly acclaimed memoir of February, Shots (Black Inc. $27.95). We're All Gunna Die is out through MGM on 7th August 2009. So there's the PR! I love comment about an extensive ''DW reissue campaign''! There is much more to come & it is well worth hearing! To start with, you can order We're All Gunna Die & Shots from Red Eye Records

Yay! I still bring out my Catfish album every now & then...great songwriter.

Oh I see. That re release has been out for ages. I thought it might have been a new record. Awesome that he's playing a live show though i think it's been almost 3 years between drinks!

Next week at the Caravan Music Club

Yes, they are doing Khe Sahn.

Is a full band show also.

anyone going to this? i'm keen.

Photos up later in the weekend hopefully.

Rest of the photos from the night

Very entertaining at Basement Discs just now.
He has a face that would make you think twice before tangling with him.

Can't be fucked reading this whole thread, but has anyone gushed over the ''Cutting Back'' solo record? Fantastic.

''The wives of all of my ex-friends are friends of my ex-wife''

The high point of the Australian-US military alliance was when Don was working at WRE north of Adelaide in the early 1970s.

Playing at the Caravan Music Club in Oakleigh tomorrow.